Steve had only recently purchased the house. Neither he nor Laurene was interested in raising a family in a rambling, crumbling mansion isolated in the hills of Woodside. They wanted their children to grow up in a more central location, and Old Palo Alto, as the neighborhood was known, was quiet, shady, and within walking distance of schools and downtown. Also, Steve’s first child, Lisa—now a teenager—lived nearby with her mother.
给小孩子的家，是更加市中心，更加有社区人气的地方This was the first of many visits I would make over the next ten years, and Steve made a point of having me, the photographer George Lange, and his assistant come to this kitchen door, which was indeed standing wide open on this warm day. The guest of honor apparently didn’t get the word to use this entrance, or else he simply forgot. He arrived about fifteen minutes after the appointed time, and used the big knocker on the front door to let us know he had arrived. Steve and I went to greet him, and Bill Gates waved to the driver of his black limo to leave. We all shook hands and went inside.
The house was a fraction of the size of the Jackling Mansion in Woodside, and just as sparsely furnished, at least at that point. The living room had a half dozen or so framed prints by Ansel Adams leaning against the walls, yet to be hung.
原来乔布斯当年还喜欢Ansel Adams，赶紧看看，是何号人物I had arranged the meeting as the key element of a package of cover stories in Fortune to commemorate the tenth anniversary of IBM’s shipment of its first PC, and to contemplate the future of the young industry. It had been relatively easy to get Bill to buy in to the idea of the interview. Indeed, he was willing to interrupt a beach vacation with his friend Ann Winblad, a fellow coder from Minnesota, who was now a venture capitalist. Like Bill, she too enjoyed taking a stack of thick books along so they could read and discuss them. Bill had begun dating Melinda French, his future wife, several years before, but even after their romance blossomed, he let her know that he planned to continue to take his “think week” vacations with Winblad.
也很难理解Gate的行为Steve, on the other hand, had played hard to get. Unlike Gates, he insisted on setting certain parameters for the get-together, primarily that it occur on his turf. Bill would have to come to his house in Palo Alto, and only on this particular Sunday. The interview violated what had become Steve’s basic criteria for publicity—he would only put himself out for stories that promoted his company’s products. If I was going to get this kind of exclusive, unfettered access on an occasion where he had nothing to sell, it was damn well going to be on his terms.
Fortune was right to recognize them as cofounders of the PC revolution, but in 1991 it would have been a stretch to predict that these same two men would shape the industry for yet another two decades. But that’s how it turned out: for thirty-five years, from the creation of the Apple II until Steve’s death in 2011, their differing philosophies helped determine the design and purpose and marketing of everything from smartphones and iPods, to the cheapest laptops and desktop machines, to the massive mainframe computers that drove the productivity of Fortune 500 companies.
Quite simply, Steve’s career had been spiraling downward, while Bill’s was soaring to unseen levels. One simple proof of Bill’s rising power: For this interview reviewing the decade since the shipment of the first IBM PC, Fortune hadn’t even considered inviting someone from IBM. That’s because Gates had neutered Big Blue even before the company manufactured its first personal computer, when he convinced them to license his operating system, MS-DOS, without an exclusivity clause. That brilliant gambit meant that by 1991 it was Gates, not IBM, who held the keys to the industry’s future.
Bill’s end run around IBM hinged on the fact that he had understood something IBM had not: that the software IBM was looking for—that is, an operating system—held the potential to be a cornerstone of the entire computer industry. An operating system manages the flow of data within a computer, and gives programmers access to its hardwired information-processing capabilities. It is the crucial intermediary between the programmer who has a task he wants to accomplish and the semiconductor chips and circuitry that can make that happen. What Bill realized, and no one else saw, was that a standardized operating system could ultimately have enormous benefit for the industry, and therefore enormous strategic potential for its steward.
操作系统，是计算工业的明珠
那么AI时代的明珠，在哪里？Gates, on the other hand, readily licensed his operating system to other manufacturers, who promptly started beating IBM at its own game. The new entrants, like Compaq and Dell and Gateway, were lean and aggressive companies that could take the two standard pieces of the IBM PC—Microsoft’s MS-DOS and Intel’s microprocessor chips—and produce clones that were faster, more innovative machines than those coming out of hidebound Big Blue. It was Compaq, for example, not IBM, that introduced the whole concept of a portable PC, opening up an important new slice of the market. Gates encouraged the clone manufacturers, licensing MS-DOS to them under the same terms he gave IBM.
下游电脑制造商，都在给微软打工
内置微软操作系统后，微软在商业、企业里的地位，更加稳固了，毕竟谁能比操作系统制造商自己更熟悉自己平台呢By 1991, Bill Gates’s operating systems were on 90 percent of all the PCs in the world. And the company that owned the other 10 percent? Well, that was Apple, which was becoming less relevant, less innovative, and less important year after year.
坐等乔帮主逆袭In 1990, Gates had bundled all his productivity applications into a package called Microsoft Office.
原来捆绑销售，是在90年代发生的Back then, Jobs was the rich face of the computer industry, his stake in the company he founded worth $256 million immediately after its IPO. When Microsoft went public in March 1986, Gates’s 45 percent in equity was worth $350 million. By the time of our interview, he had become the world’s youngest billionaire. Steve’s bank account, meanwhile, had plummeted while he scoured around unsuccessfully for another great new product.
在追求伟大产品的路上，让自己变成了穷光蛋Gates was trying to execute a plan to make Windows ubiquitous, running on anything that could compute, and he lived in constant paranoia of leaving weak spots that would allow a competitor to pierce the shell he’d built around the industry.
确实，从内部邮件里，也能看出来，Gates非常在意竞争，非常关注新技术可能带来的颠覆Bill, with some justification, always thought he was the smartest guy in the room. He was willing to explain his rationale for a decision once, but pity those who needed a second recitation
Steve cast Bill as a philistine with zero aesthetic sense and little originality. It was a view he’d hold throughout his life. Bill, he told me repeatedly, knew no other solution than throwing money and people at a problem, which was why Microsoft’s software was so convoluted and mediocre. (Steve conveniently ignored his own spendthrift ways at NeXT.) Bill bluntly painted Steve as a loser who had fallen from importance because of his own stupid decisions. He was relentless about NeXT’s insignificance. Later in the 1990s, when Jobs supported the Department of Justice’s effort to rein in the Microsoft monopoly, Gates repeatedly threw Steve in with the vast set of “losers” who “whined” about what he saw as his company’s deserved success.
零美感毫无品味，哈哈哈，真是But that Sunday in July they behaved themselves, with little friction and no open acknowledgment of the obvious disparity in their wealth and power. Steve was too proud to concede Bill’s preeminence. Bill was too well-behaved to gloat over Steve’s current woes. They accorded one another a certain level of respect. They understood each other’s strengths. With nothing at stake and the country’s leading business magazine there to pat them on the back, none of the negative sentiments flared.
After Bill attacked John Sculley for wanting to license Apple’s operating system so other manufacturers could create Apple clones, Steve got a shot in at both Sculley and Gates. “I’m not interested in building a PC,” Steve said, criticizing the standardization that Bill had promulgated. “Tens of millions of people needlessly use a computer that is far less good than it should be.”
对微软的平庸感受到愤怒Bill was the steadier and more consistent of the two. His vision of the history of the industry was as assured as his sense of where it would go. “I wrote down in 1975, when I started the company,” he explained, casting his extraordinary foresight as nothing more than a simple vocalization of what should have been obvious to everyone, “that there were two focuses of technology in terms of building computers. One was chips, the other was software.” He went on to add, “My approach to the PC market has been the same from the beginning. The goals of Microsoft to create the standards for that machine have been the same from day one.” He didn’t apologize for any aspect of Microsoft’s success. He wouldn’t outright acknowledge its near monopoly, but he argued forcefully that standardization around his operating system and Intel’s chips benefited everyone. “Now the latest chip technology passes through to the consumer so fast and so efficiently,” he said. “When Intel comes up with a new microprocessor chip, a few weeks later two hundred PC companies have come up with a machine, and you can drive out to the computer warehouse and buy a machine. It’s the same if you take software. Because the volumes are so immense, incredible software that’s ten times as good as anything that was out even five years ago is available for essentially the same price. Even in strange categories you can choose from so much software.”
非常深刻的理解，还是在1975年哦
AI时代，谁能把握这样的理解，谁就能统治下几个Decades
PC时代，盖茨认为的核心技术是2个：1）芯片；2）软件/操作系统
他认为芯片与操作系统的统一/标准化，能增大出货量的同时，降低人均成本，有利于更多人用上技术，在某些程度上，我承认他是对的Given his uncertain position at the time, it wasn’t surprising that Steve was the more volatile participant. He was willing to admit a few mistakes, even allowing that Bill was correct in saying that Apple should have taken the IBM PC more seriously. Then he took that thought further. “The singular event that defined Apple’s place in the industry in the 1980s was actually not the Macintosh,” he announced. “That was a positive event. The negative event that defined Apple’s place was the Apple III. It was the first example I’d seen in my career of a product taking on a life of its own and developing way beyond what was necessary to satisfy customer demand. The project took eighteen months more than we’d planned and was overdesigned and cost a little too much. It’s interesting to speculate what would’ve happened if the Apple III had come out right, as a lean, mean upgrade to the Apple II that offered incremental features that made it more suitable for business. [Instead,] Apple left a real hole.” Later, he made clear that much of the blame could be laid at his feet: “One of the reasons that the Apple III had problems was that I grabbed some of the best people from that project to do research on how to turn what I saw at Xerox [PARC] into reality.”
好难得的反省，深深学习！用作者的话说就是It was a fascinating admission.
这篇报道的对话原文，值得好好学习下It was a fascinating admission. Steve was never much for looking back at his own mistakes, and yet during this very public conversation with a friend whom everyone but Jobs now acknowledged as the leader of the computer industry, he was downright contrite. Later in the conversation, he even pulled out a story he’d ripped from the pages of Newsweek to make sure that Bill wasn’t offended by the author’s claim that Steve was no longer his friend. “I tore this out and I was going to call you before I knew we were getting together,” he said, brandishing the page like a trial attorney. “This is not true at all, and I have no idea where they got that.”
Bill wasn’t obsessed with the revolutionary. He knew that there was a place for breakthrough technologies, and that the nature of the tech business—indeed, human nature itself—guaranteed that such milestones would arise. But over the course of the interview he made clear that what was closer to his heart was the pain that such disruptions caused the corporate customers of his software. “All I want is a car that will run on the current streets,” he explained. “I’m on this evolutionary path.” The huge investments corporate America had started to make in personal computers and in the critical applications it used to run operations “make for some very unusual dynamics,” he said. “In an Egghead Software store five years from now you’re not going to find business software for six different types of desktop computers. Personally, I would be stunned if you would find software for more than one overwhelmingly successful type of computer, and maybe a couple of others. More than three would be shocking.”
乔布斯对盖茨的判断，真是非常准确，他本质就是个商人
但盖茨描述的也非常对，没有一个软件开发商，能有精力同时维护三五个平台，在Mobile端，我们能看到，大部分的软件从业者，也仅仅只能维护Android与iOS两端而已，WindowsPhone毫无生存空间When Steve had left Apple in 1985, the primary competition in the computer hardware business had been framed as a battle to design the best machine; whoever did that, it was assumed, would win the most customers. But six years later that wasn’t the game at all, a fact that Steve was only slowly coming to understand, in light of his difficulties with the NeXT computer. The game was now all about serving corporate customers with their millions of machines. Those companies were increasingly reliant on their PCs, which ran custom-built applications that helped them execute complicated, data-intensive operations. They needed these applications to work with every new unit. The cost of re-creating their data to fit, say, a NeXT computer that didn’t work with the Windows operating system would have been exorbitant, not just in the financial cost of reprogramming but in the opportunity cost lost to all the time required by a retrofit. It wasn’t the bells and whistles that excited these customers; in fact, they found bells and whistles kind of scary. Nope, what they needed was more power, more speed, and above all else, reliability.
非常有insightVery few people writing about this new industry in the mainstream press truly understood how personal computers had already begun to revert to institutional machines. This was mainly because it was easier for most journalists of the early 1990s to envision and get personally excited about the potential of educational software, or of managing their personal finances, or organizing their recipes in the “digital” kitchen, or imagining how amateur architects could design funky homes right on their home computers. Who wouldn’t be excited about more power in the hands of people, the computer as an extension of the brain, a “bicycle for the mind,” as Steve put it? This was the story of computing that got all the ink, and it was a story no one unfurled as well as Steve.
那么现在的AI转化，空间计算，会从哪一头开始呢?
我会认为，可能还是工业界开始，并不是个人消费领域Bill Gates wasn’t swayed by that romance. He saw it as a naïve fantasy that missed the point of the much more sophisticated things PCs could do for people in the enterprise. A consumer market can be an enormously profitable one—put simply, there are so many more people than businesses that if you sell them the right product you can mint money. But the personal computers of that time still didn’t have enough power at a low enough price to excite the vast majority of consumers, or to change their lives in any meaningful way. The business market, however, was a different beast. The potential volume of sales represented by all those corporate desktops, in all those thousands of companies big and small, became the target of Bill Gates’s strategic brilliance and focus. Those companies paid good prices for the reliability and consistency that Windows PCs could deliver. They welcomed incremental improvement, and Bill knew how to give it to them. Steve paid lip service to it, but his heart wasn’t in it. He thrilled only to the concept of how a dramatically better computer could unlock even more potential for its user.
非常精彩的市场/战略分析
消费电子成功的关键，在于出货量，手机行业为1000万台，而让这么多消费者愿意掏钱的，一定是相对低价This fundamental difference between the two coparents of the PC was made utterly clear by the interview. What wasn’t made clear, and what Bill didn’t even come close to revealing, was how his deep understanding of the computing needs of businesses would transform the computer business itself over the next several years, further sidelining anyone who, like Steve, chose to focus on the aesthetics and thrills of personal computers. Even though nobody recognized it at the time, Bill was about to take the personal right out of personal computing. Ironically, in so doing, he would leave an opening for Steve to fill—eventually.
电脑不应该只是生产力工具，在企业里提高生产力
它也可以是创意型工具Microsoft did have a key partner in Intel, whose chips powered almost every machine running the Windows operating system. But the combination of Windows and a growing suite of office productivity applications gave Microsoft an entree to corporations that Intel could never match. While the steadily increasing power and speed of Intel’s chips set a rhythm of inexorable advancements for technology, Windows and Microsoft’s other software shaped the look and feel of corporate computing. By attending to every need of both the Fortune 500 and small businesses, Bill Gates was becoming technology’s king. Intel CEO Andy Grove was, somewhat to his dismay, relegated to the avuncular role of the “elder statesman.”
虽然Intel没啥影响力，但Intel如果不思进取，还是会拖慢Windows的性能更进
所以行业还是持续需要Apple这样的创新者，充当鲶鱼Together, Gates and Grove had exploited something that Steve had ignored. Looking over the horizon, they could see that the architecture of PCs would improve so much in performance as to subsume almost every aspect of computing. In the past, high-end business machines were based on proprietary designs that didn’t benefit from the economies of scale of standardized parts. Gates and Grove knew that eventually—and it wasn’t going to take very long at all—the expensive, customized guts of engineering workstations would become juiced-up PC circuit boards, and that the same evolution would ultimately subsume business minicomputers, mainframes, and even supercomputers, those rare and superexpensive machines used for everything from modeling weather patterns to controlling nuclear devices. (For example, IBM’s Watson, the machine that in 2011 beat Jeopardy! phenomenon Ken Jennings, is one such computer based on a PC-like architecture.) As a result, pretty much every computer that companies relied on to manage their most critical operations would adopt the internal electronic architecture of a PC writ large. All were much, much cheaper and easier to program and operate than unwieldy mainframes, because they were built out of the very same semiconductor components as PCs, and usually used a variation of the Windows operating system software. Thus they benefited from the ever-improving economics of scale afforded by the combination of Moore’s law and by the breathtaking growth of the PC market itself.
强大的规模效应
手机时代，我们也看到了这样的故事，ARM芯片的普及，让ARM架构有机会向上挤占PC的空间，挤占IntelThroughout the 1990s, Microsoft would become the unchallenged steward of corporate computing. And corporations would welcome its standardization. In a headlong rush to improve productivity through technology, they spent trillions of dollars. In 1991, the $124 billion of corporate spending on information technology accounted for just 2 percent of the gross domestic product. By 2000, that percentage had more than doubled to 4.6 percent. The leading beneficiary of all that was Microsoft; over that same period, its revenues rose from $1.8 billion to $23 billion, its profits rose from $463 million to $9.4 billion, and its stock price appreciated 3,000 percent.
美国企业的信息化投入，居然能占到GDP的5%，好可怕，震惊
那对于中国来说，这里还有着非常大的机会啊！！！
但中国基本是国企、央企，很难规模化、标准化，估计都是内耗，可能一大批份额会给三大运营商、阿里云By the late 1990s, it was almost as if the Orwellian scenario of the Mac’s “1984” commercial had come true. Big Business, with a pair of capital B’s, ruled computing. The drones used what they were told. The personal had been stripped out of personal computing. Year after year after year, Microsoft’s domination increased with one inevitable and inexorable and dull step after another. It seemed that Windows might rule forever. The rise of Bill Gates was as dull as the computing he enabled. At least that’s how Steve felt about the work of his far more successful rival.
正是因为行业如此沉闷，APPLE的新产品，才令人如此兴奋All this standardization left an opening, of course. An opening for someone who preferred creating machines that delighted real people, rather than primarily serve the needs of business. An opening for someone just like Steve Jobs. At the time of our interview, Steve was still a confused fellow. His lingering resentment of the way he had been treated by Sculley and the Apple board, his frustration about the misfortunes and secondary importance of NeXT, and his egotistical need to matter in an industry whose direction was being dictated by someone else made it impossible for him then to see a way out of his dilemma. For the next few years, he would press ahead with his goal of making winners of NeXT and Pixar. But eventually he would sense his way to the opening that Gates had left behind—the opening for a company that could once again make insanely great computing machines for you and me. And when he found that opening, and made the most of it, he was rewarded with a kind of adulation that Gates would never come close to receiving.